


Generations

by Jezunya



Series: The Pepperony100 Challenge [8]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: #59 - Future, Angst, F/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Present Tense, pepperony100 challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:59:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1395436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jezunya/pseuds/Jezunya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees them sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Generations

He sees them sometimes, always together. Usually in the kitchen. Occasionally, in the living room or even in the dining room. Not in the workshop, because that is his space and his mother has never seen that particular room, but he can see her in every kitchen in the world, even his own. 

Their images don’t blend, but they sit beside each other – dark tresses and red curls, olive tones and freckly ivory. They’re very different, nearly opposites, but they sit across the table from each other peeling or shucking or paring and laughing together in that harmonious way that only women can achieve. 

He’d stand in the doorway and watch them, and the house would be full of estrogen, but in a good way. In the way that happens around holidays and birthdays and graduations, in the way that means warm pies and faces smeared with flour and spatulas pointed in his direction ordering him out before he breaks something or makes something explode or steals any more of the food they’ve worked so hard on. 

He’ll help when he can – usually washing dishes, because his mother is a woman from another generation and cooking was a woman’s territory in her day and still is in her house. Or her son’s house. When she’s there, it doesn’t matter whose house it is, it’s her kitchen. Pepper will snicker at him behind her hand and he’ll throw water at her from the sponge he’s using and Maria Stark will step in to protect the pies and tell them they can have their lovers’ spat later. Preferably behind closed doors. 

Sometimes, there’s a third presence, and it always catches him off guard. She’ll step into the room when he least expects it, all bundled redhead energy and large dark eyes, his eyes, his mother’s eyes, and fall in beside the other women like it’s the most natural thing in the world. She’ll steal berries from the bowl on the table while her mother helps her roll out a pie crust and her grandmother starts singing a lullaby in the middle of the day just so that the next generation can learn its words. 

She’ll lean back and grin at him in their secret way with that sparkle in her eye that lets him know she finds the scene as amusing and endearing as he does, even though she is a part of it and that only makes it all the more amusing and endearing to him. Then she’s drawn back into the circle of women, purpled hands dropping berries and juice into the waiting pie tin and singing along with Grandma Stark as she starts to pick up the words. 

And Tony will sit back and wait for the vision to end, as it always does, because the one was lost to him long ago and the second isn’t really his and probably never will be and so the third can never exist at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me [on tumblr](http://jezunya.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
